How learning works

In the last few decades, cognitive scientists have made significant progress toward understanding how and under what conditions the brain takes in and stores information—or in other words, what facilitates and hinders learning. Few university instructors are taught any cognitive science before or after they join a faculty, however, and they consequently default to teaching the way they were taught, regularly doing things that interfere with learning and failing to do things that promote it. Fortunately, a growing number of books now exist that translate the often dense jargon of brain research to language instructors in any field can read, understand, and apply. A particularly good recent translation is How Learning Works,* a well-written formulation of seven instructional principles that come directly from cognitive research and their implications for teaching practice. Here are some highlights. Principle P1: Students’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning. Most information taken in through the senses either never enters our consciousness or is quickly filtered out and lost, with only a relatively small percentage being retained in long-term memory. The odds that students will retain new information increase if the information is explicitly linked to their previous knowledge. Also, students often come to our courses with misconceptions about what we are teaching. If we fail to convince them otherwise, they may learn to parrot our statements of the concepts on exams but their faith in the misconceptions will remain unshaken.